Residencies '19 - '20

Malissa Anne Canez Sabus

"Often times we characterize our identity using seemingly concrete ideas, in the form of a narrative with a beginning and an end, where in every sequence there is a placeholder or rather a token of our existence. Whether these placeholders are a photograph, a relationship, an abundance of objects, or perhaps an event thought to be progressive, is for the individual to decide. But as we further ourselves into the digital space these concrete signifiers begin to erode, and the temporal reality takes hold.

I am specifically interested in re-articulation, in making visible the invisible, in breaking historical narrative to expose the truth of artifice and challenge notions of duration. My works often reference the history of television and film before the digital era and are made to challenge existing images through materialist interventions; strategies such as re-photography and video editing allow mash-ups, alterations, miss-interpretations and re-framings.

In recent years I have become particularly interested in Melancholy. For my time at Frans Masereel Centrum I have proposed to make a kind of Research folio that explores different printmaking techniques to investigate how these processes lend to my understanding of both contemporary and historical notions of melancholy."